Irene Schneider

Irene Schneider holds the Chair of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Göttingen University since 2003  (currently on leave). She gained her PhD from the University of Tübingen in 1989 and her Habilitation from Cologne University in 1996 . Her main fields of interests are ḥadīth-research; reconstruction of early Islamic history; Islamic law in its historical and contemporary manifestations; gender and law in Muslim countries; Islam in Germany; contemporary concepts of ideas and history (civil society, human rights; translation); and law and colonialism. She has worked on Iran, Afghanistan, Morocco and Palestine.

ERC Advanced Grant 2024: (De)Colonizing Sharia?” Tracing Transformation, Change and Continuity in Islamic Law in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in the 19th and 20th Centuries

European colonialism’s encounter with Islamic law or Sharia, the main pillar of the pre-colonial legal systems in the Middle East and North Africa, has had a tremendous impact until today. The implementation of modern European-style legal systems has led, as some scholars claim, to the abolishment of Sharia. Others consider the legal changes through which Muslim societies have transited as a sign of Sharia’s flexibility rather than its demise. The principal question this project addresses is therefore: How was Sharia transformed by colonialism? The question mark in the project title “(De)Colonizing Sharia?” allows us to deliberately leave open the extent of the continuities, changes or ruptures that characterized Sharia during the colonial and the postcolonial periods and focuses on the processes of transformation. The project relies on extensive archival fieldwork and the intensive reading of texts to investigate the codification/legislation, jurisprudence/legal theory and judicial institutions in Egypt, Morocco, The Gulf states, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Iran and Crimea representing diverse forms – British, French and Russian – of the colonial encounter. We focus on the agency of legal actors, provide paradigmatic case studies for comparative evaluation and reflect on the fundamental terminological and theoretical questions underlying how “(De)Colonizing Sharia?” can be adequately grasped, researched and described. More broadly, my team and I expect high returns by challenging the scholarship grounded in European terminologies, theory and academic traditions in close cooperation with our colleagues in the region. We are convinced that the results will be highly relevant for contemporary academic and political discourses in Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere, and for the emerging field of decolonial legal studies.

• Debating the Law, Creating Gender: Sharia and Lawmaking in Palestine, 2012 – 2018.  Leiden:  Brill 2020 (Women and Gender. The Middle East and the Islamic World 18).
• Translating International Law into a System of Legal Pluralism: The Role and the Influence of the Sharia Judicial System in Palestine and CEDAW; in: International Law between Translation and Pluralism, ed. by Noorhaidi Hasan and Irene Schneider. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz 2022 (Studies on Islamic Cultural and Intellectual History 4), 71-98.
• The Religious and the Secular: Othering in Legal and Political Debates in Palestine in 2013; in: Religious Othering, Global Dimensions, ed. by Mark Juergensmeyer, Kathleen Moore and Dominic Sachsenmaier. London: Routledge 2022, 123-146.
• Legalizing a Custom, helping women? The new regulation of khulʿ in Palestine since 2012, in: Knowledge, Science, and Local Tradition. Multiple Perspectives on the Middle East and Southeast Asia in Honor of Fritz Schulze, ed. by Irene Schneider and Holger Warnk. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz 2021, 73-95.
• Gender Equal Islamic Theology in Germany; in: Muslim Women and Gender Justice, ed. by Dina El Omari, Juliane Hammer und Mouhanad Khorchide. London: Routledge 2020, 62-85.
• Family law and succession, in: Routledge Handbook of Islamic Law, ed. by Khaled Abou El Fadl, Ahmad Atif Ahmad and Said Fares Hassan. London: Routledge 2019, 324-339.
• How is the Past Used to Construct Gender Concepts in the Present? The Example of the Textbook for the Course on Personal Status Law at Birzeit University/ West Bank (Winter Semester 2013-14); in: Uses of the Past: Sharīʿa and Gender in Legal Theory and Practice in Palestine and Israel, ed. by Irene Schneider and Nijmi Edres. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz 2018, 69-94.
• Divorce Gaza Style: Regulations and Discussions in Gaza and the West Bank (2013-2017); in: Islamisches Recht in Wissenschaft und Praxis, ed. by Hatem Elliesie, Beante Anam and Thoralf Hanstein. Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang Verlag 2018, 177-205.
• Polygamy and Legislation in Contemporary Iran: An Analysis of the Public Legal Discourse; in: Iranian Studies, Volume 49, Issue 4, Juli 2016, 657-676. Doi: doi.org/10.1080/00210862.2015.1028239
• Translational Turn and CEDAW: Current Gender Discourses in the Islamic Republic of Iran; in: Indonesian and German Views on the Islamic Legal Discourse on Gender and Civil Rights, ed. by Noorhaidi Hasan and Fritz Schulze. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz 2015, 133-165.